Manchester: 40 Years of Public Investment as Precondition
Before turning to London's experiment with Strategic Industrial Land (SIL), it is worth looking at Manchester. Because what today is considered frontier territory in Barking or Waltham Forest has a 40-year prehistory in Manchester.
Between 1961 and 1983, Manchester lost approximately 150,000 manufacturing jobs – more than 60% of its industrial employment. Ancoats, the heart of Victorian cotton spinning, stood empty for decades. The decisive break with the British standard-issue deindustrialisation script of demolition and suburbanisation came in the 1990s. Manchester decided to treat the Victorian mills as urban capital, not as objects for demolition. The robust load-bearing structure, the large block sizes, the connections to canals and rail – all of this was understood as the real estate foundation for regeneration.

What is really remarkable about Manchester is the role of public investment. Unlike many German cities, where productive urban space often emerges as a side effect of private development decisions, Manchester has systematically underwritten its urban transformation with public money. Over £1.5 billion has flowed into the Metrolink light rail network since the 1990s – today, with eight lines, the largest light rail system in the UK. The extensions to Oldham and Ashton-under-Lyne have reconnected periphery and centre. Since 2018, the Bee Network under the Mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) has ensured that bus, tram, cycling and walking are conceived as an integrated system – the first British city outside London to return bus franchising to public control after Thatcher's 1986 deregulation.

Productive Cities Exist at Multiple Scales Simultaneously
What the excursion revealed by comparing the three cities: there is no "correct" model for urban production. There are complementary scales and typologies that together form an ecosystem. And precisely the search for new typologies enabling a compatible mix of housing and production is the truly innovative core of the current British debate.

Advanced Manufacturing we saw at Filton (Bristol). The Brabazon Enterprise District sits at the heart of the North Bristol Technology Cluster – Airbus, Rolls-Royce, GKN Aerospace, and BAE Systems in view. But the approach is explicitly not a classical business park. Production is integrated into a new urban neighbourhood with housing, green spaces, and amenities.

Large-scale Vertical Intensification at Industria in Barking – 45 to 47 tenant units stacked, up to 300 jobs across over 10,000 square metres, targeting sectors such as creative industries, tech, and food. The new UK reference for purely productive stacked use, delivered by Be First, the regeneration company of Barking & Dagenham Council.

Small-scale Vertical Intensification at WorkStack in Charlton, south-east London, by dRMM Architects – delivered for Greenwich Enterprise Board (GEB), a social enterprise with over twenty years of experience providing affordable workspace in the London Borough of Greenwich. On a compact brownfield plot of only 1,426 square metres, the building stacks 14 workshop units for productive craft and creative businesses across five storeys, with cantilevered upper floors to maximise usable floor area. The units range from 55 to 110 square metres, offering tenants choice and growth room within the same building. Current occupiers include furniture makers, knitwear producers, workwear manufacturers and a bicycle/motorcycle workshop – together around 60 jobs. Notable is the employee density of 428 workers per hectare, compared with the London industrial average of 69 per hectare. Structurally, WorkStack is built from Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) and glulam sourced from certified European forests, storing 343 tonnes of carbon. Where Industria at over 10,000 square metres sets the new reference for large-scale stacked production, WorkStack demonstrates on a minimal footprint that the same logic works for micro-businesses – and that small brownfield plots need not be converted to residential use to remain relevant to the urban economy. RIBA London Awards 2025 shortlist.

Mixed-Use with a Substantial Production Component directly opposite at 12 Thames Road / Crossness Yard by BPTW Architects, also delivered for Be First. Four towers of 4 to 17 storeys contain 156 affordable homes (100% affordable, split between London Affordable Rent and Discounted Market Rent), spatially stacked above 17 light industrial units with a community café as ground-floor interface. Total investment approximately £85 million, funded through Right-to-Buy (RTB) receipts, a grant from the Greater London Authority (GLA) and Council borrowing – pure public investment.

Unlike typical mixed-use projects, in which production is reduced to a token footnote, 12 Thames Road has a genuinely substantial production component: 5,086 square metres of light industrial floorspace are not an add-on but an equal-ranking part of the programme.

Centralisation of the Wholesale Markets through the Great London Markets Consolidation – the relocation of Smithfield, Billingsgate, and New Spitalfields to a single 42-hectare site within view of Industria. Over £1 billion in investment, approximately 40% of London's fresh food supply concentrated in one location.
Standing at Industria, seeing Crossness Yard and the four residential towers of 12 Thames Road just across the street, and looking north-east to the Wholesale Markets construction site, one experiences the complementary elements of the new London model within very close range – pure intensification, mixed-use with substantial production component, centralised logistics infrastructure, and within view, residential use as boundary condition. An urban planning coherence unique in Europe.

But just as important as this coherence is the political framework behind it. Without the GLA's Strategic Industrial Land planning category and without the clear substitution and intensification rules of London Plan Policy E7, none of these projects would have been economically thinkable. Between 2001 and 2020, London lost over 1,300 hectares of industrial land, mainly to housing. An area larger than 2,000 football pitches. The Blackhorse Lane SIL Framework, finalised in March 2022 by Waltham Forest Council in collaboration with the GLA, follows the same principle – with the crucial addition that existing businesses were consulted first, before developers gained access. Business engagement instead of top-down planning. For the German Manufacturing Cities debate, this is the central lesson: binding protective categories in building law and public investment as catalyst are the preconditions for moving urban production from planning aspiration to built reality.

Another project we visited in Hackney Wick is Wick Lane by dRMM Architects, completed at the end of 2023 for Taylor Wimpey London. The scheme is a co-location project under the framework of the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), combining 175 homes with 2,250 square metres of commercial space across six distinct building volumes. The urbanistically striking decision, however, lies in the orientation: it is not the residential units that form the edge to the street, but a strip of double-height commercial and light industrial units.

The residential buildings behind are deliberately oriented inwards, towards a quiet, planted podium courtyard designed by Grant Associates.

The reason for this arrangement lies south of Wick Lane. There, one of London's extensive Strategic Industrial Land areas begins – a cluster of workshops, small businesses and logistics uses that the LLDC explicitly protects in planning law and safeguards for long-term productive use. The heavy goods traffic and industrial background noise along the road are therefore not a temporary condition to be gradually displaced by future residential development, but a planning-secured permanent feature of the site. This is exactly what the buffer typology of Wick Lane responds to: the commercial layer along the street absorbs the noise and movement of its neighbours, filters them in urban-design terms, creates active ground-floor frontages onto the street, and simultaneously delivers an economically self-supporting second use layer within the building itself.

Wick Lane is thus the built answer to a situation that would typically be resolved differently in Germany: instead of gradually pushing back the industrial area opposite in order to bring housing right up to the street undisturbed, the project accepts the productive neighbour as a permanent planning condition and translates it into an architectural principle. Together with 12 Thames Road in Barking, Wick Lane forms the second realised reference for substantial co-location in London – one council-led (Be First / BPTW), the other delivered by a volume housebuilder under a strong framework (Taylor Wimpey / dRMM / LLDC). Both demonstrate: when planning framework and delivery model align, co-location emerges as an independent typology, not as a token gesture.

Mobility and Public Space: The Public Realm as an Investment Decision
Mobility, streetscape and green infrastructure were the second major thematic field of the excursion. What began in Manchester in the 1990s with the Metrolink build-up has today become a coherent reduction and rerouting strategy, without the city having to pursue radical "car-free city centre" rhetoric. Deansgate was permanently converted into an active mobility zone in 2020. Chris Boardman, as Cycling & Walking Commissioner, is driving forward a 1,800-mile network modelled on Amsterdam. And institutional parking facilities – such as the large car park of the National Health Service (NHS) at University Hospital – are becoming active planning instruments: kept fee-based, reviewed in their existing use, partly repurposed for community uses. Anyone wanting to wean a city off the car must also rethink the land reserves of its public institutions.

The most striking reference for this strategy is the Ancoats Mobility Hub. The building by Buttress Architects, opened in May 2025, is a UK-first of its kind and at least as significant as Industria in London – just not for production, but for the reorganisation of an entire neighbourhood's transport logic. Nine levels, 406 car spaces (102 of them with charging points for electric vehicles, with capacity to be extended to 100%), 150 secure bike spaces with changing facilities, showers and wash rooms, up to 30 spaces for Enterprise Car Club and other car-sharing services, 400 photovoltaic panels on the roof and over 400 square metres of green wall covering the full height of the building.

What really distinguishes the Ancoats Mobility Hub from a conventional multi-storey car park, however, are the active ground-floor uses from which the neighbourhood directly benefits. Two commercial units open onto the newly created public space between the Hub and Ancoats Green: Popup Bikes, a cycle repair café, and Phase Five, an athletic performance centre – both uses that align programmatically with the Hub's underlying philosophy (active mobility, health, green travel) while turning the building into a lively neighbourhood address. In addition, there is a parcel delivery hub with lockers, allowing residents to collect their deliveries centrally rather than each courier driving to individual addresses. The target: to reduce delivery vehicle mileage in the neighbourhood by 1,200 kilometres per day – a concrete, verifiable climate target. Over 1,300 square metres of newly landscaped public realm with seating, planting and outdoor dining connect the building as a pedestrian and cycling route to the refurbished Ancoats Green.
Most importantly, however, the Hub makes something possible in planning terms: it breaks the traditional coupling between residential lease and parking lease. Residents can acquire or relinquish a parking entitlement as their life circumstances change. For the 1,500 new homes in the vicinity, this means individual plots are freed from parking obligations – space for active ground floors, green areas, community spaces, neighbourhood uses.

The funding structure makes the principle legible. £40 million public investment in Ancoats overall, of which £28 million from Homes England alone for the Mobility Hub, £4.7 million from the GMCA Brownfield Land Fund for the public realm, £32.7 million capital expenditure by Manchester City Council. No private developer would have financed this building. The planning innovation – centralising parking, decoupling it from housing, activating ground floors for neighbourhood uses, consolidating delivery traffic – was only possible because public capital provided the groundwork.

In London, it becomes clear that mobility hubs in different locations must meet very different requirements. The mobility hub at Snaresbrook on the periphery functions primarily as an interchange and park-and-ride point between car, bicycle and public transport, reaching into the suburban context.

The hub at Leicester Square, by contrast, is functionally something entirely different: a so-called Dark Hub. The term describes, by analogy with the Dark Kitchens of the food service industry, an infrastructure not open to end customers but dedicated exclusively to operational logistics. Operated by the start-up Port in cooperation with the parking operator Q-Park, a former inner-city car park has been repurposed as a charging and docking station for electric delivery vehicles – primarily e-bikes and cargo e-bikes, plus e-mopeds and e-scooters. Couriers working for Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Amazon Flex and other platforms rent the vehicles through an app on a daily or weekly basis. The principle: the courier commutes from a suburban home into the city centre, picks up a fully charged vehicle on site, works with it for the day and docks it in the evening. The hub is thus a building block of a new city logistics – the translation of the growing last-mile delivery traffic from combustion vehicles to small electric vehicles, with central charging infrastructure in inner-city car parks that are losing significance as car storage anyway. Both hubs together make clear: there is no standard solution. Mobility hubs must be programmed from the specific neighbourhood and its economic function.

Equally relevant for Manufacturing Cities is the role of heavy rail in the network of productive locations. The Elizabeth Line, running across London from the eastern hinterland to Heathrow in the west, connects not only centre and periphery. It connects residential neighbourhoods with the Strategic Industrial Land clusters such as Barking Riverside and with office locations such as Shoreditch, where the Black & White Building is situated. For productive urban space, exactly this connection is decisive: workers must be able to reach their locations reliably, whether they work in a light industrial unit, a coworking office or a wholesale market. Where public investment in heavy rail is missing, urban production remains spatially isolated – no matter how well the individual production buildings are designed.

Bio-Based Materials from Community to Office Building
The third thematic field of the excursion was the question of bio-based materials in ambitious urban construction. Two realised projects at very different scales mark the range of what is possible today.

We Can Make in Knowle West, Bristol, takes the smaller but perhaps more disruptive approach to the housing question. The project is led by the Knowle West Media Centre and represents a resident-led response to Bristol's acute housing shortage – developed since 2016 as a pilot with Bristol City Council. The core idea: small, underused plots within existing neighbourhoods – front gardens, wide corners, gaps between existing buildings, end-of-terrace sites – are nominated by residents themselves as so-called "microsites" and activated for the construction of small, affordable homes. In Bristol alone, up to 20,000 potential microsites have been identified. The approach inverts the classical development logic: it is not an external developer that decides where to build, but the neighbourhood itself that proposes plots – often because a family member needs a smaller, accessible home, or because a young family wants to stay in the area.
Two houses have been built to date in Knowle West: Novers Lane, developed with an adult community nominator and now rented to a young family with roots in the neighbourhood, and Belstone Walk, designed specifically for an older wheelchair-using resident who needed a fully accessible home. Both houses were completed in 2022/23 and awarded the RIBA National Award 2024 as well as a nomination for RIBA House of the Year.

Materially, the model is delivered through a Community Housing Factory in Bristol – a local prefabrication facility operated by the partner BlokBuild, in which the homes are produced as prefabricated components from Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), cork insulation and wood fibre elements. The factory is a result of a project by InnovateUK, the UK's national innovation agency. What is emerging here is more than an architectural pilot: it is an integrated response to three challenges at once – housing shortage, underused urban land reserves, and the need for bio-based, climate-compatible construction. And it is being built with the people who will live in it.

The Black & White Building by Waugh Thistleton Architects in Shoreditch marks the other end of the scale. Completed January 2023, it is at 17.8 metres Central London's tallest mass timber office building. Six storeys, 4,480 square metres, delivered for coworking operator The Office Group (TOG). The hybrid structure combines four types of engineered timber: a frame of Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL) made from beech for columns and beams, Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) made of European whitewood spruce for walls, floors and core, glued laminated timber (glulam) for the curtain wall construction, and thermally modified American tulipwood for the vertical solar shading louvres. 1,330 cubic metres of timber from certified forests in Germany and Austria (227 beech trees, 1,547 spruces) – balanced against a concrete foundation and lower ground floor. The result: 37% less embodied carbon than a comparable concrete scheme, 1,083.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide saved, embodied carbon of just 410 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per square metre (kgCO2e/m²) across life-cycle stages A1 to A5. 872 individual components, designed in Building Information Modeling (BIM), fully demountable. Design for deconstruction as a fundamental principle.
What the two projects together demonstrate is the range. Bio-based materials work equally well in community-scale housing and high-end commercial construction in prime Central London locations. From two microhomes in Knowle West to a six-storey office building in Shoreditch – both are built, both realised, both accessible.

What we Can Learn From This Week
Manufacturing Cities is not a nostalgic concept. It is a radical renegotiation of what cities must deliver for their inhabitants: work and living in the same quarter, integrated mobility and green infrastructure strategies instead of sectoral planning, material cycles instead of global supply chains, production as a visible element of public space.

The British examples make concrete which ingredients are needed. Clear planning frameworks that legally protect productive spaces. New typologies that spatially enable the compatible mixing of housing and production. A matter-of-course use of bio-based materials at community and commercial scale. And – perhaps most importantly – substantial public investment acting as catalyst.

This is exactly where the greatest potential for knowledge transfer to Germany lies. Manchester's £1.5 billion Metrolink investment, Homes England's £28 million for the Ancoats Mobility Hub, the £40 million Ancoats programme overall, the £85 million for 12 Thames Road, the over £1 billion for the London Markets Consolidation – these are the real catalysts without which none of the innovations of this week would have emerged. The German debate on urban production has so far leaned more strongly on conceptual models and private development dynamics. The British approach shows an alternative: when municipalities and higher-level authorities are willing to make upfront investments with public capital and actively set planning frameworks, projects emerge with a coherence and quality that would not be achievable through private markets alone. This week in the UK has given us very concrete vocabulary for that argument – and several built references to cite in presentations, applications and discussions.

Christian Scheler & Kai Michael Dietrich, July 2026